An Ultrabook upgrade suited to any travelling professional

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The key things we look for when it comes to the performance of any Ultrabook are portability and speed. The Toshiba Satellite Z930-10X measures only 20mm thick and is light as a feather, at 1.1kg.

The chassis is identical to the earlier Toshiba Z830 and has the same gunmetal grey colouring. It doesn't turn heads in the same way as the Asus Zenbook UX32A or the Apple Macbook Air, but you won't have any trouble carrying it around the city all day.

The new third generation Intel processors are specially designed to consume less voltage and improve battery life. The Toshiba Satellite Z930-10X lasted 210 minutes before submitting to the rigours of our looped HD footage and battery testing software, which isn't a bad result.

The closest rival to this machine, the Asus Zenbook UX32A, posted a score of 208 minutes after the exact same test.

One particularly useful feature of this Ultrabook is the sleep and charge function. This means you can juice up a smartphone, tablet or similar device from one of the USB ports on the Toshiba Satellite Z930, even when it's on standby mode.

As we mentioned, Toshiba is keen to position this as a work-friendly PC. Yet the keyboard and trackpad are by no means the best we've seen on an Ultrabook.

The keyboard is an isolation-style affair, with black keys that offset nicely with the grey chassis. As expected given the slimness of this machine, the travel on the keys is tiny. If you type hard then you'll immediately notice this, and be forced to soften the blows somewhat.

Similarly, the multi-touch trackpad is on the smallish side, with slightly stiff buttons.

We've seen rival Ultrabooks - such as the HP Envy 4 - offer sizable trackpads that work better with the multi-touch gesturing. Of course, if you're using this laptop every day then you'll swiftly overcome these minor limitations and feel right at home with the Toshiba Satellite Z930-10X.

Although Toshiba has pre-installed a wide range of software onto the Satellite Z930-10X, you won't find performance unduly hampered. On the first boot-up there will be notification boxes from the likes of McAfee to fight through, but for the most part the bloatware stays out of your way.

Some of it, such as the Bluetooth Assistant or Battery Manager, is quite helpful, while other offerings - such as the WildTangent Games app - we doubt you'll ever use.